There are Two Choices

As I’ve noted many times on here, I’ve no television. But I’ve been keeping up with the Paris news via the litany of news outlets online. The whole event is juxtapositioned against the backdrop of patriotic bunting, police tape, orange cones, and people, as a parade is taking place on Main Street where I live. It’s enough to make any sane person wonder what is precisely real in this world we live in now.

I’m a stickler with myself concerning words. Modern English sensibility seems, for the most part, lost on the populous at large here in America. Not only have we moved the language toward something more symbolic, where any number of words now mean the same to us, but we also simply make up words, turning nouns into verbs, vice-versa, and combining words to make cute little phrases we think are clever. Like anything else, this can be cute and effective at times. Few understand (or care) about the appropriate nature of things; when and where to use such cleverness and, most importantly, when not to use said cleverness.

The attacks on Paris have been called “a tragedy” more times than I can count on the news sites, blogs, etc. These attacks are not a tragedy, they are planned attacks. Murder by numbers. All-out war. It doesn’t matter from which side you frame the issue. If the Islamic State indeed is responsible for the death and destruction, then the Islamic State is merely following along with another attack. If so, this is war, not tragedy. Frankly, I’m not convinced anything is what is seems anymore. There is a thick veneer of illusion pulled over our heads by our media and our devices we worship media upon. So, for argument sake, I’ll assume for a moment that the Islamic State is not, in fact, responsible; that here we have another false flag of violence to set the masses into panic. That, Reader, is also war. Those who would be called your leaders lining you up like chess pieces to be knocked down so that fear is instilled. That is not a tragedy, either, again I say it is war.

We also bandy about with words as though merely speaking them gives them meaning. Such phrases as, “our hearts and minds are with those affected by this tragedy.” Or, the American President’s use of empty rhetoric to declare that the deaths in Paris are attacks on “our shared values.” But our hearts and minds are right where they’ve always been: focused dead on ourselves. We’ve become liars and shills, slaves to politically correct speech patterns, most unable to even be bothered with being confronted with that truth. And what about those ‘shared values’, then? Obama is not the problem here, for the record, merely a symptom. He does his job ridiculously well, considering that he laid out all the details of how he’d do that job from day one. From day one, he was a slick salesman with a plan. We voted him in, thus right or left or politically in the middle, no one can claim immunity from the responsibility.

Those ‘shared values’ now are shades of truths we don’t even understand anymore. Merely dull, blurred shadows without any of the crispness that used to define them. These ‘shared values’ remind me of cardboard cut-outs of celebrities: they look just damn like what they’re supposed to be from the front. Walk behind them, however, and you’ll see a flat bit of nothing propped up by a flimsy stand. A good gust of wind knocks them down.

Paris will take care of Paris, or either she won’t. People will only be pushed so far and they will either fight back then, or give in to the demands of the enemy who declared war. Contrary to our rainbow and unicorn mentality of our status as ‘enlightened’ and ‘evolved’ humans, there aren’t any other choices. Reality cares not one whit about what we dream. Reality is concerned with the Laws of the Universe. Laws that do not bend at the whims of our wishes.

Laws that with every single day of our existence in this fake world remind us that we are the servant, the Laws of Reality our master. We can continue blaming others, or we can make our choices and live with the consequences by choice. Because, as we’ve seen once more, dealing with consequences will either be by our choice, or forced upon us. Those are the only two options.